Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Cybersecurity and Public Goods

From the conclusion: "In World War II, as German bombs fell on British factories, the British government did not require each factory to build its own anti-aircraft defense system, complete with fighters, radar, anti-aircraft guns, and fire and medical emergency responders. Rather, defense of the nation’s factories was left in the hands of the government, whose leader, Winston Churchill, saw their protection as an obligation of the national defense establishment. Yet today, as we face a new but also similar sort of threat—cyber attacks, like aerial ones, can cover a great distance in a short time—the idea of making the national government exclusively responsible for providing national cybersecurity seems quaint and utterly impractical. We can’t imagine government “cyber fighters” deployed on the Internet; nor can we envision a government-sponsored data backup and recovery system...there is a clear but limited domain in which government action is both appropriate and required: that of fostering the sharing of cybersecurity information" Read more